Sass vs Symfony

You are able to declare custom functions with Sass (for example, converting units) which can be easily invoked, even when using shorthand properties. This results in cleaner, more reusable code.

Sass allows you to nest selectors which results in code that is both faster to write and cleaner to read.

For example, this:

.parent 
  color: blue
  .child
    color: yellow

Will compile to this:

.parent {
  color: blue;
}
.parent .child {
  color: yellow;
}

Another big advantage for Sass is the very active community pushing the development forward at a rapid pace. Sass is constantly coming out with bug fixes, and are often the first to come out with improvements.

This is an important factor to keep in mind when picking a preprocessor to invest your time into.

It comes with two possible syntaxes:

• Sass - No parens or semicolons allowed and the nesting is dictated with whitespace.
• SCSS - SCSS syntax is a superset of CSS – which means SCSS can be written as CSS, but has been expanded to include the features of Sass as well.

SCSS is easier to pick up for beginners and Sass has a cleaner syntax. Having both syntaxes means you can pick the one that best suits your coding style.

The mandatory syntax rules for both SCSS and Sass results in a more consistent code. For a more detailed analysis between Sass and SCSS go here. To see a nice comparison of the Sass syntax against CSS and SCSS go here.

Sass simplifies minifying CSS files by offering a one-line command that will output a minified version.

It's very comfortable and easy to write/learn Sass, even for beginners.

Sass can be used with a framework called Compass, which provides additional functions and mixins which can reduce the amount of code you have to write.
For example, Compass will take care of vendor prefixes.

This:

div {
    background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(#F00, #000);
    background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(#F00, #000);
    background-image: -o-linear-gradient(#F00, #000);
    background-image: linear-gradient(#F00, #000);
   }

Can be written as:

.gradient {
    @include background-image(linear-gradient(#F00, #000));
}

For a full list of features, check out the Compass documentation.

Rather than being limited to editing the outputted CSS file in devtools, with source maps you are able to manipulate the original .scss file.

There is also a C/C++ port of the Sass CSS precompiler called Libsass that decouples Sass from Ruby. It is very fast, portable and easy to build and integrate with a variety of platforms and languages.

The latest implementation of Sass is written in Dart, and compiles to pure JS with no native code or external dependencies, means you no longer need Ruby or libSass.

Since it's written in Ruby, it's easier and faster to use with Ruby apps.

Symfony is open source and released under the MIT license.

Symfony comes with a built-in toolbar that helps developers debug their applications during the development phase.

The toolbar is also extendable and new components, called panels can be added if needed to help with the debugging process.

One of the greatest strengths of Symfony is it's amazing and large plugin ecosystem, which comes as a result of it's large and dedicated community. Having a large number of plugins means less development time and more productivity.

Symfony has one of the most active communities out of all the PHP frameworks. This is shown by the high number of commits made every day in the GitHub repo.

Symfony makes you be a better programmer. You have to deal with the latest object-oriented design patterns such as service-oriented architecture, dependency injection, interface abstraction, and so on.

Symfony makes use of XML, YAML or PHP annotations to create configurations in order to tell Doctrine on how properties of a certain class should be.

Symfony has a powerful built-in event system that allows you to add flexibility to applications and makes it easier to maintain the codebase down the road.

Uses Twig, which is a simple and easy to learn templating language that can also be used as a standalone engine, outside the framework.

Symfony makes use of the Doctrine ORM to add an abstraction layer over the database in order to maintain flexibility without having unnecessary code duplication.